basketmaker

Following on from my previous post about Basketry & Beyond’s visit to MERL yesterday, I just wanted to quickly post the list of information we think it’s important to record about baskets in museum collections. When I attended the Woven Communities basketry symposium last year, several museum curators mentioned the lack of expert knowledge about baskets embedded in their catalogues, and the need to work with basketmakers to better understand their collections. This was also the case with the collections at MERL, although baskets acquired prior to 1970 had been examined by Dorothy Wright, who recorded information systematically in her ‘Catalogue of Baskets’ forms. Building on those forms and the experience I had enhancing the catalogue records for MERL’s basketry collections (see earlier post), I compiled the following list in preparation for Basketry & Beyond’s research visit and for future research visits by other basketmakers. Hopefully this can be used to inform future work about baskets both at MERL and at other institutions. I’d be interested to know if anyone has anything else to add!

General information

Standard name of basket

Dialect names and where they were used

Information about this specific basket

Creator (who made this basket)

Place made (where was this basket made)

Date made (when was this basket made)

Acquisition source (who was this basket acquired from)

Acquisition place (where was this basket acquired from)

Acquisition date (when was this basket acquired)

User (who used this basket)

Place used (where was this basket used)

Date used (when was this basket used)

Use (what was this basket used for)

Materials (what is this basket made from)

Construction method/techniques (what is the construction of this basket)

Shape (what is the shape of this basket)

Dimensions (what are the dimensions of this basket)

Unusual features (unusual features of this basket, compared with other baskets of this type)

Associated information (anything else relating to this basket)

Information about this type of basket

Materials (what was this type of basket commonly made from, if specific example is different)

Construction method/techniques (what was the construction of this type basket, if specific example is different)

Period in use (when was this type of basket used)

Use (what was this type of basket used for)

Distribution (where was this type of basket made/used)

Makers (who made this type of basket)

Current makers (is anyone still making this type of basket – who are they, where are they based)

References (books, articles etc. referring to this type of basket)

Images and other media (video, audio etc.) representing this type of basket

Wider historical context relating to this type of basket

Unusual features (unusual features of this type of basket compared with other types of baskets)

Associated information (anything else relating to this type of basket)

Over the past few months MERL has been working with an organisation called Basketry & Beyond, who have recently received a HLF-grant for a project to preserve and promote the heritage of basketry in the South West. This includes a Festival at the Dartington Estate in Totnes, Devon, in May to celebrate all aspects of basketry, with a focus on the themes of fishing, farming and fashion.

Yesterday six members of Basketry & Beyond came to MERL for a research visit to look at some of the baskets we have from the South West (the cataloguing work done as part of the Sense of Place project on the basketry collections means it was easy to identify this material – see an earlier post). The group were particularly interested in the types of baskets that are typical of the South West, rather than individual baskets that were made, used or acquired from the area but are not typical of the region. This included lobster pots and stores, Tamar chip baskets, Devon splint baskets, and salmon putchers. This research will be used to produce fact sheets about the history and heritage of the regional baskets, and will feed into an exhibition at the Festival.

This lobster store (MERL 64/206) was a lot bigger than I was expecting!

We had a great day in the MERL stores. As well as having the baskets out to examine (some of which were surprisingly large) we had lots of books, pamphlets, magazine clippings, and photos from the MERL Library and Archives. There was a lot of sharing of knowledge – both ‘peer-to-peer’ between basketmakers (as everyone had their own area of expertise), and ‘specialist to non-specialist’ between the basketmakers and Ollie, Felicity and me ­– and plenty of exchanging of notes, articles, etc. Both sides now need to collate this information in meaningful ways – Basketry & Beyond for their fact sheets, and us to input into and disseminate via the online catalogue.

As well as being able to gather lots of useful information for the Festival, hopefully the session also gave Basketry & Beyond an opportunity to gain experience in researching and recording relevant information which they can use when visiting other institutions. We’re hoping to run this type of session again with other basketmakers to find out more about our basketry collections, particularly those which came in after 1970 and have never been examined by a basketmaker, so this was a good opportunity for us to figure out how what works well – the numbers of people it’s practical to work with, the number of baskets it’s possibly to look at in a day, the best way to record the information and feed it back into the catalogue, the things we need to have access to while working (the online catalogue, a scanner, a photocopier etc.).